Why Are The Major US Bike Manufacturers Moving Away From Deep Section Wheels?
Look at Trek’s Emonda and Domane lineup. None, at any price point, has a rim deeper than 35mm. Only the Madone sports a deep-section rim. The total lineups of Emondas and Domanes top out at 37mm rims.
Specialized is the same way. Though, at least the top-of-the-line Tarmac features a 60, but the top-end Roubaix sports a measly 32! The Tip-toppy Aethos, a bike costing an astounishing $15,500 only sports a 37mm rim. The Dura-Ace Di2 model, with a price tag of $13,000 only comes with a 33!
The mid-range Aethos, a $4,700 bike, doesn’t even list the depth of the alloy wheelset that comes on the bike (looks like a 25, maybe a 27). It wasn’t long ago you could find a nice set of 40s on a mid-range road bike.
What in tarnation is going on here?
This is a $13,000 bike (on sale for $12,000) and as beautiful as this bike is, those wheels aren’t going to get it:
This is more like it:
Of course, I’ve got my cynical guess (I think they’re calling common sense ways of looking at things “conspiracy theorizing” today), but I’m trying with everything I’ve got to resist the urge to put this to a silly money thing, where the manufacturers are trying to get top Dollar for their high-end bikes, only to turn around and burn cyclists for a decent set of aero wheels on a bike they’d already shelled out five figures on. I’m going to email Trek and Specialized to see what’s up. If I get a buzzword-laden corporate email, it’ll be quite easy to see what they’re up to.
That said, everything (and I mean everything) still shows that the best aero bang for our Buck is a 40 to 60mm rim. Anything more than a Sixty and you get hammered by crosswinds… which is exactly why I love the 50s on my Venge and the 38s on my 5200.
My Best Bowling Single Game and Series Evah!!!
The bowling is going strong this year. I’ve got a fantastic four-ball lineup to choose from that allows me to dial in from my favorite spot with ease. They go from strong, all the way to the weakest of weak, a plastic ball. Each of the four is drilled so well, I can’t tell the difference from one to the other except by the feel, or texture.
Last night, I threw my first 700 series (actual) and a 279 (actual), during which a threw eleven strikes, with a 9/ in the sixth… when I got to thinking about how cool it would be to get my first 300. I yanked the shot just a little bit, but simmered down immediately after.
Now, if you’re wondering why that wasn’t a 290-something, it’s the placement of the spare. Strikes count the next two balls, so that strike in the 7th was worth 30-points. Ten for the strike, plus the next two balls, which were strikes. If that 9 had been on the very last ball, that’s a 299. If it had been on the second to last, 289. Make sense? I know, it’s rather complex and it took me forever to get a grasp on it.
Anyway, in addition to that near-perfect 279, I threw a respectable 191 on the first game as I struggled to find a good line, then a 233 the second game (after I did find the line I could work). Add them up and that’s a 703 actual, my best series by something like 50 pins (if memory serves).
I had a smile stretched across my face for some time last night. Pretty cool.
Now, if you check the categories for this post, you’ll see “recovery” is checked. Our team name, and nobody has ever caught this in the three decades the team has been around, stands for “Clean & Sober”. We’re a recovering team. Currently, I think we’ve got something like eight or nine decades cumulatively.
Okay, With Christmas Over, It’s Time To Get Busy!
I’ve been working up to being a little more responsible about my health. It’s been a long time in coming, but now that Christmas has come and gone, I feel I can let go of the excuses and start eating like I don’t want to see my cardiologist in the next few years. In fact, if I don’t see him again till I’m 80-ish I’d be perfectly happy.
As well, it’s time to get serious about cycling and getting ready for the spring. And there’s a new twist! Included with our healthcare, which I finally won’t have to pay for because I’m an actual employee, comes a gym membership – and my wife approached me to see if I’d take her (!). Well smack my ass and call me buttermilk, I’m going to the gym, boys and girls! I didn’t see that one coming.
Add to that, my daughter, who has since recovered from our way of eating and looks amazing, has offered to sit down and plan some meals out with us so we can put a stop to the winter bulking.
Finally, we’ve got the South American answer to weight loss. I asked for a trio of hot (but not too hot) sauces for Christmas and received those from my sister-in-law… along with another in a flask-shaped bottle that’s so hot it comes with a warning label. CHECK!
Anyway, I’m looking forward to getting back to the slimmer me. It begins.
Merry Christmas!
From me and mine to you and yours, Merry Christmas.
All I’ll say is that without the spiritual experience that preceded my recovery, I don’t know where I’d be. I doubt it would be on the right side of the grass. Thank God for that.
A Merry Christmas Eve Update
I haven’t written in quite a while. I’m learning an entirely new career and there’s a lot to take in that provides… room for distraction. I’m working with a new schedule and I’ve been more than a little lazy in trying to figure out where I can slide an afternoon ride in. More distraction and a bit of hiding, if I’m being honest (and I always am that, to a fault).
It’s gotten to a point, it’s tough to sit down and coalesce my thoughts into something that would be passable to read, let alone a post that actually means something. Other than the recovery angle to this, which is big going swimmingly, I haven’t even taken the time to figure out why some of the more expensive road bikes have gone to shallow section rims on their $7,000+ road bikes. Let’s just say I was more than a little shocked when I looked up the 2024 Trek and Specialized lineups to see their high-end bikes with shallow-section rims. I’m curious enough to start digging into it. Trek’s Emonda SLR 9 AXS, the tippy-top-of-the-line, has shallow-section wheels and runs $13,000! I’m guessing one of two things, here; 1. Cost – even at $12,000 to $13,000, the bigger companies are trying to trip over Dollars to save a nickel. 2. They’ve figured out a way to make a shallow-ish section wheel perform like a 40 in a wind tunnel, so they get lightweight and decent aerodynamic performance. They needed a way to shave some weight off, really. Bikes were getting a little heavy after the addition of disc brakes, even if they are vastly superior to the old rim brakes in stopping power and not grinding the rim. There is a third option; it’s a little bit of both.
The Co-Motion tandem line is the same as last year, though their eBike looks like it’s advanced quite a bit from the previous year. Their tandems are all beautiful and worth every penny.
Everything is going so much better than I’d hoped, I’ve gotten to the point I’m mentally pinching myself. I’ve worked really hard with my sponsor over the last several months and it’s really paying off. My wife and I are doing better than we ever have at any point in our marriage, and that’s been sustained for quite a while – it’s awesome. I’m getting along with our daughters better than I ever have, and I love that! Work is going vastly better than I could have hoped, too. They’re happy with me, and I’m exceedingly pleased with where I’m working and who I’m working with. I’m the old man in the group, too. Not necessarily in terms of upper management, but definitely in terms of the office. I’ve been married longer than some have been alive. Let me tell you how weird that is! I enjoy it, though.
The good fortune will be mixed with challenging times, for sure – it always is. In the meantime, though, I’m going to enjoy things as they come… and work on acceptance. That’s my sponsor’s new mantra. I’m not liking it much, though. That angry streak I had has a tough time living in that environment.
Oh wait, that’s probably a good thing, too. Heh.
Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ll be back at it soon.
Remembering The One Thing That Makes All Else In Life Worthwhile.
With my new job, it’s exceedingly easy to put all of my effort into learning the new system; everything from what we do to how we do it. A lot of it is old hat, but there’s a lot to take in. A month and a half in, I feel like I’m ahead of schedule, but I don’t want to let my foot off the gas, either.
That said, when I put my focus on work, let’s say “too much”, I tend to pull back from doing the things that made all of that possible. In fact, with many of the people I work with in “the program”, this is a normal pattern. So normal, it’s predictable.
I came to the realization earlier this week that I’m falling into that pattern and it’s time to change it. This isn’t “difficult”, really. Doing the work of the program is mainly a thought exercise and taking the time out to talk to my sponsor and those I’m working with. If I let myself slide too far into the old pattern, thoughts I can manage without recovery surely wouldn’t be too far down the road. Once I hit that level of idiocy, it can be tough to… erm… recover.
My recovery has made all of the good in my life possible. Without recovery, there is nothing. Good, anyway.
Dealing With Tough Times In Recovery
I’d love to say that, should one be fortunate enough to find their way to work the program in such a way that we “thoroughly follow the path”, that it gets easy at some point. I’d love to tell you I’ve gotten to a point, even now when I’m working harder at this that I did at any point since my 3rd anniversary. that you can spike the ball and proclaim to the group that you’ve arrived.
That’s just not how it works. There are long stretches where the “work” feels effortless and easy. Well, maybe not easy… simple. That doesn’t last, though.
Right now, in the middle of some difficult times (my friend’s cancer is worse than he let on, new job, daughter broke up with “the one” yesterday, so my wife’s heart broken), I can’t help but feel sad/bummed, in a very small, dark corner of my brain, that the “simple time” equilibrium is being f***ed with.
I try all kinds of things to get that equilibrium back, but it always amounts to “fighting it”. If we learn anything in recovery, it’s to stop fighting, so this gets tricky, indeed. I’ve got one part of the melon committee fighting to get back to the simple, good times, and the rest of the committee screaming with arms raised, “Wait a second, bro! You’re not supposed to be fighting anything!”
It’s a weird place to be, I can tell you that!
I simply have to take these days one at a time, and do the best I can. No spiking the ball today.
Feeling Like Home In The New Job… Finally!
A senior colleague took a couple of us new kids on a field trip to visit a few jobs last week. On the first, we had an issue pop up that needs to be addressed. A subcontractor didn’t perform up to any kind of standards on a project. It was one of the worst install jobs I’ve seen in my career.
Unfortunately, that subcontractor’s management wasn’t seeing it the same way. Having grown up in construction as a subcontractor, I’d never leave a project sitting like that. It’s simply unacceptable.
This is where I feel at home in my new job.
I started poking around the corners of the web, looking for industry standards. That wasn’t very fruitful, but I learned a lot in the process and that’s a good thing. Then, rather than mess with industry standards, I started poking around the sub’s contract documents and submittals (that’s paperwork showing what with and/or how they’ll build something in the field).
It took some digging, but I found more than enough to get them to fix their problems. I shared everything with the project manager running the job for our office and sat back in my chair for a few minutes, relishing the fact that I’m starting to feel like home in my new job. There are still a lot of new things to learn and get used to, but there are those things that will be just like “the good old days”.
Neat little tidbit; with recovery, all of this has come to be. I owe all of my peace, happiness and contentment to AA and recovery. Without either, I’d have been worm food twenty years ago.
And for all of that, I am grateful.
Veganism And The Latest In Misused Studies You Can Expect To Be Incorrectly Parroted For Years To Come
I read an interesting article that quoted a study that took 22 identical twin pairs and put them on two different diets for eight weeks, then drew conclusions that the vegan/vegetarian diet was better for human health than an omnivore diet because good results were seen. It’s true, indeed, but read on because you have to read between the lines to get the half of the story CNN buries.
Now, before we get started, this is from CNN so you should expect to be lied to going in. Or maybe “lied to” is too harsh. Maybe we should simply say, “you should expect that the half of the story that refutes the headline, or premise, will be left out of the story for [insert reason here]”. Lest we forget, this is the same news industrial complex component that stated (with a straight face) Joe Rogan was taking a horse dewormer to combat COVID in the early goings.
Folks, if you can’t report the facts as they are because good news may benefit a person or group of people you don’t want to help with good news, you aren’t a news organization. I don’t care which side you’re on.
Now, let’s get back to the facts that have to be inserted into the story about the aforementioned dietary reportage.
1. You can’t imply long term benefits with a study that only lasts eight weeks. Eight weeks is too short to draw long-term conclusions from. Everyone starts out gangbusters on a vegan or vegetarian diet, as long as they’re consuming hyper-processed vitamin supplements to balance out the nutrients they’re missing out on because of that diet. Eventually, that gray, pasty vegan skin befalls adherents of that diet without hyper-fanatically-processed supplements.
2. The test group was too small, even if the news seemed encouraging for an eight-week period.
3. The true test is, by the authors’ own admission, the vegan diet isn’t real-world sustainable because it’s too restrictive (I’m sure the vegetarian diet holds more promise, but only slightly). Only the truly religious amongst adherents would stick to a vegan diet for any length of time.
4. The Three Bs of the human diet: barbecue, bacon and burgers, baby. Enough said, I rest my case there.
I expect nothing less than the rhetoric continuing to ratchet up around this topic. I almost wrote “debate”, but it really isn’t one. The topic is a pickled herring inside a red herring.
I’ve Finally Gotten To The Point Where I Can’t Take It Anymore…
I started disliking how little I’ve ridden over the last four weeks around a week ago. It started wearing on me. My clothes are a little tighter, I’m definitely not happy with what I look like in the mirror… but I put it off to stress from the new job.
It’s not that I’m horribly out of shape. It’s that I can see things slipping and I just can’t take it anymore.
When I got home last evening, after work, I went for a quick trip into town with my wife, then hit the trainer as soon as I got home.
I didn’t go for long, only a half-hour, but I really got after it. I hit gears normally reserved for February when I’m well into spring shape. I just won’t take being lazy anymore. It’s time to wake up.
Fit Recovery 